The Stanford Media Preservation Lab (SMPL) has many partnerships on campus and the recent move provided a great opportunity to spend some time working in the audio room of one of those partners, the Archive of Recorded Sound (ARS). Several recordings were digitized and documented while there. Two projects completed of interest are the digitization of several recordings made by the a cappella group the Stanford Mendicants and the transfer of cassette tapes from the book and audio set: Photochemistry of Organic Molecules (POM) held by the Media & Microtext Center.

The Stanford Media Preservation Lab (SMPL) is making good progress in setting up shop at our new location in Redwood City.

SMPL moved from Page Mill Road in Palo Alto -- along with HighWire Press, Stanford University Press, LOCKSS, and parts of both Preservation and Special Collections -- to 425 Broadway over Labor Day weekend. (Shortly thereafter Stanford announced plans to redevelop the Redwood City site and create a major auxiliary campus.) We're very excited about the new space! It provides us with several opportunities to streamline and improve our facilities, workflows and services. More about that in a future post. For now, here are some photos illustrating our progress.

The discovery of a particular scanning defect called Bayer moiré, occured while creating image files at Stanford University Library's Map Scanning Lab and prompted a more focused study. The Bayer moiré defect affects the ability of software to lift features from maps digitally. An analysis of findings has supported developing a better understanding of color filter array technology and some of its associated quality issues: rationales for on-demand file remediation of affected image files, options for map imaging in the future, an effective and open-source approach for vectorization, performance improvements for producing and vectorizing raster images.

An article on this study, authored by Matt Pearson,G. Salim Mohammed,Renzo Sanchez-Silva and Patricia Carbajales, which includes additional quality control measures for imaging large maps and a refinement of the topo raster image specification is now published in the Fall 2013 issue of the Journal of Map & Geography Libraries: Advances in Geospatial Information, Collections & Archives, entitled "Stanford University Libraries Study: Topographical Map Vectorization and the Impact of Bayer Moiré Defect." For more details please read the article.

I'm pleased to announce that the Stanford University Libraries have digitized a complete set of the rare (and fragile) avant-garde Yiddish literary and artistic journal Yung-Idish. All three issues were published in Lodz, 1919, and the digitized versions are found at the following URLs:

For background on the Yung-Idish (or: Yung-yidish) group, see the entry in the YIVO Encyclopedia: http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Yung-yidish."The founding of Yung-yidish, the first Yiddish artistic avant-garde group in Poland, grew out of a meeting in 1918 between poet Moyshe Broderzon and a group of visual artists centered around Yitskhok Broyner, Yankl Adler, and Marek Szwarc. Eventually, the group included some 20-odd members including Yitsḥak Katzenelson, Yekhezkl-Moyshe Nayman, and Hershele, as well as younger people discovered by the group, such as the artist Henekh Bartshinski and the writers Elimelekh Shmulevitsh, Khayim Leyb Fuks, and Yisroel Shtern."

In addition, I see that there is a Facebook page devoted to the group:

Stanford's set of Yung-Idish is part of the Ezra Lahad Collection, which was acquired by Roger Kohn for Stanford in 1998. The issues, on crumbling thin cardboard stock, were painstakingly conserved by the Stanford Libraries' professional conservators in 2012, prior to their digitization.

The Glen McLaughlin Map Collection of California as an Island is now available online.The 731 maps were collected by Glen McLaughlin over a period of 40 years and acquired by Stanford in 2012. It is the largest known private collection of maps showing California as an island. It is now available for anyone to search, find, view and download via the Stanford University Library's catalog. Please visit californiaisland.stanford.edu to read more about the collection. Viewing the paper maps will be on a per-request basis.

The University Archives is pleased to announe that it has added several items to the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR) recently. Included amongst the treasures are a variety of University maps and motion pictures, as well as faculty papers. Highlights include:

The Stanford Media Preservation Lab (SMPL) – the unit responsible for digitization and preservation of Stanford University Libraries' (SUL) extensive holdings of sound recordings and moving images -- is busy this summer preparing for our new home at 425 Broadway in Redwood City. SMPL is one of several SUL divisions relocating from our current occupancies at 1450-1454 Page Mill Road at the behest of the University.

Over 50 pieces of film, audio, video playback and treatment equipment -- nearly 1 ton of gear -- plus the desks of SMPL's four staff will be moved over Labor Day weekend (August 31 – September 2, 2013). In preparation for the move, normal lab operations will begin to wind down in early August. The work to reconfigure, cable and re-install the equipment will take 2-4 weeks. We expect to resume regular levels of services and productivity by October 1.